Ingestion of NaCl is important to the survival and well-being of animals (including humans), because sodium intake is critical to fluid regulation and electrolyte balance. Certainly, both the taste of and memory for what has been consumed plays an integral role in the selection of essential nutrients. The present studies are aimed at developing a new behavioral task to explore the temporal retention properties of short-term memory for tasted NaCl solutions, which promises to be a novel finding that will open doors to many other useful experiments about learning and memory in the gustatory system. The studies are also designed to use the same task to describe the ability of the Sprague-Dawley rat, a popular animal model for taste guided behavioral studies, to discriminate suprathreshold intensities of NaCl. Knowing the ability of the rat to discriminate solutions of NaCl will provide a solid baseline for which comparison of manipulations of the system can be based. The present studies will assess the necessity and sufficiency of the peripheral gustatory nerves for performance on intensity-based discriminations of NaCl. This will lead to a better understanding of how the peripheral gustatory system is organized for taste information processing. [unreadable] [unreadable]